Editor's note: The following article contains spoilers for Part 1 of You Season 4.

You, Netflix’s twisty, provocative show centered around a serial killer and his quests for romance, has recently come out with Part 1 of its fourth season — which should perhaps be its last one, if the show wants to maintain integrity. Over its first three seasons, You followed Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), whose compulsion to follow and seduce women tends to go even more awry when he ends up killing them for not living up to his impossible standards and endless hunger for intimacy. The first several seasons all connected together through various strands of the same formulaic plot, while the fourth season (at least in its first half that’s recently been released) sees things moving in entirely new directions. The question moving forward is what the show is — is it a serialized piece of shocking crime fiction mostly meant for entertainment, or does it have something deeper it ultimately wants to say? If You ends with Season 4, then it could provide a cap on what has been a good piece of social commentary so far.

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Joe's Arc in the First Three Seasons of 'You'

Season 1, which saw Joe pursuing Beck (Elizabeth Lail), showed a story of obsession unfolding over text messages and social media, which played a fairly big role in the early days of You. The story was a lurid tale and had plenty of stalking and kidnapping to go around, but under all of that, it did tell a story of how the digital world has eroded privacy and complicated modern life. It wasn’t a heavy-handed tale, but it wove in questions of how to stay safe in a world where everything was so open — and there were plenty of murders and escalating tension as it went along. The story as a whole has turned a critical eye at romance and how easy some cases turn into obsession.

Victoria Pedretti as Love and Penn Badgley as Joe in Season 2 of 'You'
Image via Netflix

Seasons 2 and 3 of You were connected by Joe's relationship with new partner Love (Victoria Pedretti). She matched Joe’s sociopathy with a killer instinct of her own, which was only revealed well after he had already set his sights on her, much to his chagrin. You had fun playing with the idea of what would happen with two killers sort of unwittingly getting together, neither really knowing what they were getting into at first. It was a twist on the formula and proved Joe could be caught off guard, and gave him some character development as he wrestled with what to do about Love. Love was a good mirror for Joe, raising the question of what would happen if someone he coveted was as dark as he is. Joe's disdain for her as soon as he learns of her own dark instincts would be humorous if it had not been so ironically sad. As Love said just before her death at the end of Season 3, they could've been perfect for one another.

You showrunner Sera Gamble said in an interview with Collider that she was drawn to writing in general because of how it could help her relate to people. That’s sort of at the core of what You is about. Joe thinks he knows these women, and he idolizes them and puts them on pedestals with some sort of false idea of who they are. And they think they know him, too, because he puts on disguises and lies constantly. Dating is all about the connections and Joe, despite his twisted sensibilities, seems to genuinely want to connect, too. When they, or the relationship, don't match the fantasy ideals in his head, he gives into awful, dark impulses to kill or kidnap these women. Season 3 of You, which saw Joe and Love married and with a child, continued to flesh out the dynamic — ending with Love realizing that Joe is an empty bottomless void, a creature of endless wants who will never be satisfied. But Joe gets the best of her and kills her, too.

'You' Breaks Its Pattern With Season 4

Kate and Joe staring longingly into one another's eyes in a scene from season 4 of You.
Image via Netflix

You Season 4 sees Joe now in London and mingling with a group of elite aristocrat types, with Joe now being stalked by a mysterious outside force called the "Eat the Rich Killer" who is murdering various rich folks, sending cryptic messages — it’s all very baroque, rife with mystery. It feels like a different kind of show because for the first time, Joe is as confused as the rest of us. Season 4 of You, at least in this first segment, feels the most disparate from everything else yet. The setting is the most different it’s been in any of the seasons yet, and Joe’s past life is almost totally jettisoned in favor of something new. He does away with the connections to the previous seasons pretty fast in Episode 1 — he lets his Season 3 obsession Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) go unscathed, even refusing to kill her when a wayward hitman tries to blackmail him into it.

It appears that Joe is trying to evolve, and the subsequent four episodes see him making his biggest strides yet toward that goal. He tries to restrain himself from indulging when women make advances on him. In those scenes, his inner dialogue is a touch remorseful, far more hesitant than it once was. He kills a bodyguard in self-defense when the man attacks him, and he’s still up to some stalking. But this time he is following curt socialite Kate Galvin (Charlotte Ritchie), to protect her from the wiles of the new unknown killer. But mostly, he actually, surprisingly, seems to be trying to change. This, of course, doesn't erase any of his unforgivable crimes of stalking and murdering innocent women — but it does show that You might be trying to move in a new direction. The story seems to be tapping into the well of the anti-wealth stories that have become popular in the past few years, including Triangle of Sadness, The White Lotus, Glass Onion and several others. This, along with the whodunit plotline, make this season of You into something tangibly different from old installments, and Joe's attempts at trying to help people could either be a non-sequitur from the old seasons or the beginning of a new and final character arc for him.

'You's Fate Comes Down to What Kind of Story the Creators Want to Tell

Ed Speleers as Rhyse Montrose and Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg in You Season 4
Image via Netflix

The question going forward is just what type of story You is. Joe could feasibly go through another handful of seasons, always in some new location, getting caught up in killing random assailants and stalking new attractive women every year. No further development of the character would be needed if they didn’t want to. You has the kind of racy, pitch-black thrills and appeal that it could reasonably remain likable enough even if the creators did extend it for numerous further seasons. It’s just a question of what the substance of it would be. There’s the chance that the whole thing would devolve from its stellar beginning seasons — the macabre nature of the show's early seasons couldn't last forever. Following a character as toxic as Joe likely couldn't be sustained over more than a few seasons without overwhelming or exhausting the viewer, and it would be hard to keep upping the ante. As of now, it appears like You's current incarnation is attempting to turn Joe into something of a vigilante, a more sympathetic figure trying to change and take down even worse evildoers.

Modern TV shows are different from some of the ones from years past. Shows of old could comfortably roll along for a dozen seasons or more, changing little except for some new characters, some old ones departing. They were comfort food and served as a specific mode of entertainment that people could kick up their feet and relax to. Many shows now have finite endings, and arcs that are meant to come together and culminate in something definitive over time. There are merits to this — unlike shows that simply reset every season or every episode and are contained with simple jokes, long-form modern TV can really explore the form and make something different than either older episodic shows or movies. It can allow for more emotionally resonant material and developed characters due to the longer-form nature of the storytelling.

Given what Gamble and Badgley have said about the show and their dedication to saying something with the material, it would be a prudent move to end You strong with this season or another one very soon. There are murmurs of Season 5 being the ending, though nothing has been officially stated yet. A show like You, which has been trying to tell an evolving story, should go out as strong as possible with a cohesive statement.

You Season 4: Part 1 is streaming now on Netflix. Part 2 will be available to stream on March 9.